Abstract
iPad-based eye tracking could support Parkinson’s disease (PD) screening and longitudinal monitoring by enabling objective, low-cost, portable assessment of oculomotor function. We previously validated an iPad-based eye-tracking system against the EyeLink 1000 Plus for temporal and spatial saccade metrics. Here, in a convenience sample of 19 healthy controls (HC) and 12 patients with PD, we recorded eye movements simultaneously with both devices during pro-saccade, anti-saccade (AS), memory-guided saccade (MGS), and self-generated saccade tasks. Across all pre-specified metrics, statistically significant PD–HC differences and null results were concordant between devices. In addition, saccade-level mixed-effects models showed small group × device interaction effects that remained below literature-based benchmarks for clinically meaningful PD–HC differences, indicating that iPad-based measurements preserved benchmark clinical-grade group-level effects. A compact three-metric iPad-based classifier comprising AS directional error rate, AS gain, and MGS gain supported strong subject-level PD–HC discrimination, with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.98, sensitivity of 0.91, specificity of 1.00, and accuracy of 0.96. These findings support scalable tablet-based oculomotor assessment for PD-related screening and longitudinal monitoring.
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Acknowledgements
This study was funded, in part, by Analog Devices, Inc. through a partnership with the MIT Medical Electronic Device Realization Center (grant number: Not applicable), and by the MIT Aging Brain Initiative (grant number: Not applicable), the Northwestern University Department of Physical Therapy and Human Movement Sciences (grant number: Not applicable), and the Northwestern Medicine Enterprise Data Warehouse (grant number: Not applicable). The funders played no role in study design, data collection, analysis and interpretation of data, or the writing of this manuscript.
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Koerner, J., Zou, E., Karl, J.A. et al. iPad Eye Tracking Reproduces Clinical Grade Oculomotor Differences in Parkinson’s Disease. npj Digit. Med. (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-026-02753-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-026-02753-9
